Status Check

Here’s your chance to brag, rant, and share where you’re at in the game right now.

The current in-game leaderboard doesn’t exactly reflect the true standings, and some of you I know are also hesitant with revealing your official monopoly city streets name to the public – so you can do so here anonymously if you’d like. (though at sometime if we’re going to form alliances, names sure would help)

I haven’t logged in today but here’s where I’m at:

- Level 5, score of about 4 billion
- I’ve had to abandon early local streets that were more meaningful to me. Currently I’ve got 6 or 7 streets not to any one particular region in the world
- all streets cleared and revamped for higher returns.
- The only tool I’ve been actively using so far has been Monopoly City Street bot Script
- Receiving the occasional attacks, no constant and ongoing enemies, but feel it may be ramping up

What about you?

Tax obviously becomes a big factor for most people at this stage, how are you optimizing your game? Are you actively using your destroy/hazard cards? Do you have unprovoked enemies that have declared war on you? Are you in an existing alliance?

Lowly Level 4 on M$300,000,000 at the moment, pending a few offers on longer streets but focused on my home town which seems to bring the money in, has a fair few long winding roads round hills! I have a couple of foes who keep attacking and I don’t have much luck with the chance cards so it takes a while to demolish factories! Don’t bother with scripts/tools as I try to play without assistance as it were!

wow – tool free, i was playing like that for a long while, but it does make things a lot easier, without any shift in the way you would actually play the game… if i ever really need to demolish factories and i’m not cash-rich at the moment, i just switch to bulding temporary green houses for higher chance odds

I am was at level 4. I am having to abondon my original account. The local’s are ruthless. I am being attacked by a person who has 12 accounts, because I was winning in the leadership boards for that city.

I wish I could help out our true friends by bulldozing a hazard on their streets and build bonuses on this streets as well. Also an upgrade button would be great on the buildings to you don’t have to demolish them and rebuild.

wow, i guess the locals really does make a difference. some people say it’s all quiet… i think they should really switch the rules so your ‘local’ is really whatever region you have the most number of streets in, rather than your first purchase

Um… yeah… I’m a little pissed off right now. For a few days now I haven’t been able to place buildings on my biggest road even though there were available spots. I figured it was a bug and they would work it out in a day or two, so I put my efforts into my next biggest street. No big deal, right?

But a “funny” thing happened yesterday. I logged in to collect my rent and it was about 1/2 of what it should have been. Confused, I took a look at my streets to find that my biggest street I’d been having issues with, was completely empty of buildings and bonus buildings. I had probably $1.5B of buildings on it and over 20 bonus buildings (and still more room to build). Nobody demolished or sabotaged me, it was just empty — and it still is. I sent them an email, but I don’t expect to hear back anytime soon. Even if they do get back to me, I’ll be losing tons of ground each day that goes by.

Anybody else have something like this happen? Stuff like this is making me want to quit playing all together.

I had the issue with buildings on streets but not being able to, or the buildings not showing up. I’d spend 20 minutes building on a street and watch my bank balance go down, refresh and the balance would go back up and I had no new buildings on it. I didn’t lose any buildings and everything is still intact, but it fixed itself after the next pay out.

I would leave that street as is for a day or two and see if it fixes itself, that way you can keep the money you’re getting from other streets and put it elsewhere and if it does all come back, you won’t have spent all of your money on rebuilding it.

I wouldn’t hold my breathe for a response from MCS either, but I guess you knew that.

Got an email back from the Monopoly folks regarding the lost buildings…

We apologize for the delayed response, and we thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate it.

We have had data problems when users are building many hundreds or thousands of
buildings on streets, which has caused a loss of data for that street through corruption. We have not deleted any data deliberately but we are unable to recover the lost buildings. The fix for this issue is pending. However when it is implemented, it will not be applied backwards to reinstate buildings lost to date. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience of the lost buildings.

Again, we’re sorry about the loss of buildings but are working diligently to fix all bugs with the game to ensure the rest of your MONOPOLY City Streets experience is a pleasant one.

I’m level 5, with a score of just under $4 billion and I’m now bringing in about $950m each day via 7 streets.

I too have sold all of my original streets and ventured out into the world looking for any long ones I could find, the longest being a $20m street that I still have. I’m tempted to clear that street and spend my fortune on Sky High Towers ($30m). I’ve more than already got the $20m I spent on the street back, so it’d be a good way to use the money up and hopefully limit the damage from negative chance cards.

When I first started I was being attacked left and right as I was top of the local leaderboard, but not anymore. Almost all of my streets have 6 bonus buildings on them and I guess the other users just see it as a waste of time now to attack me, as I don’t attack anyone either (even when i was being attacked constantly I didn’t).

The only tool I use is the MCS Tools bot for auto-building, one-click selling, and easy sorting of streets.

Nah I’ve had no issues with MCS tools at all, and one of the cool things they do is find an ass-load of streets that are free and post them on their site for anyone to purchase (all the best ones are gone now, but they add more regularly): http://mcsclans.com/streets.php

I play my game in Google Chrome as it’s a lot faster than my Firefox and the only gripe I have is that I have to “install” (click a bookmark) the script every time I sign in. Minor though.

I’m level 5 with a score of about 1.5billion, 6 streets, 300 million+ a day in rent. I have some big streets that I paid 10-35 million for and I’ve been plunking a combo of greenhouses, grid buildings and sky high towers down on each when its not being too slow to do so. Post reset I have had zero hazards played against me, but I haven’t gone out of my way to attack others either. Just trying to build up the income and bonuses really. I’ve got about 4-6 bonuses on each street. Not using any tools.

My main gripes are:

1. Sometimes its too slow to play.
2. Its near on impossible to find a street worth more than 10 million now.
3. Glitches. So many.
4. Seeing red signs on/near big streets only to find out its about 1 inch of the road that is for sale for about $10k.

Level 5 with a score of 1.45 billions, 12 streets, and 400-ish millions in rent after tax. Presently upgrading my earliest streets from Cottages and Gree Houses into Spear Ends, may swell one or two of the lowest paying ones when all is said and done.

Very annoyed at the latest string of creative errors the good people in charge of this have come up with, supposedly to prevent cheating (but which only ends up harming honest players), eg “City Council won’t let you…” and “Too many requests”

i don’t think i’ve ever seen a ‘city council’ message.. that’s interesting. 12 streets – you must be paying quite a bit of tax then ..7×3 – 21%… are you sure you wouldn’t benefit from dropping any streets?

That’s one thing I’m planning to look into. I have one or two short-ish (read: merely a million or two) road I could probably do without. The tax is why I switched from purchase-and-build to upgrading.

I only ever saw the City Council message once, and that appear to have been a bug, since I was able to build on that street again moments later.

(I also switched from upgrading to Spear Ends to upgrading to Sky High because, frankly, even 60 Spear Ends is a lot of time)

Got over 4bil today, 7 streets. Mostly suffering from the capped number of buildings at around 415/street – see their “temporary fix” in the latest blog post.

Using my own tools for finding streets, building, etc – a street DB website is in the making, so far about 65000 streets over $3 Million. The Firefox-based ones are just too slow when it comes to long streets. Using Chrome for human interaction, noticeably quicker with the JavaScript involved – and can build at regional zoom without any add-ons.

Made my fortune with heaploads of Grid Buildings, moved to more expensive ones due to the cap.

My local people are relatively quiet, only got attacked once so far. Local leader board #1, national top10

My building tool is written in Ruby and running from home, so anyone who would want to use it would need the Ruby interpreter installed. Sometimes it’s quite glitchy, but I think that’s their fault because when it retries the exact same thing it usually works.
I don’t really intend to publish that, anyone that already has Ruby on their computer is able to write it himself, and for the others GM is so much easier to get.

The street DB is grinding away on my server, using PHP because cURL can do multiple requests in parallel for added speed. I’ve got most of Europe and the southern US covered, currently working on Florida. Refreshing the whole set takes less than an hour, so when I’m done writing the web interface it’ll be nicely up-to-date all the time
I might ditch all streets below $5 Million, would reduce the number by about 50% without really reducing the usefulness.
All that’s missing from the website is the filtering, for example “show me all available streets between 40 and 50 degrees north, 100 and 110 degrees west”

As of today’s payday I am at just over $2 billion. I own 7 good sized streets that I am just about done transitioning from Grid to Cube Quarters. I don’t think I am anywhere near the top for my local (NY), let alone national (USA). However that is not a bad thing after hearing the horror stories of getting pummeled as soon as you appear in a Top 10 list. I have used MCS to help clear and build, but nothing else as far as tools go.

I have reached the point where I am not sure what to do next. Not sure if I should start demo’ing the Cubes and put something bigger up? I have heard some suggestions to skip right to the $30 million buildings. I am afraid the ROI is going to kill me. But on the other hand, unless I go out street searching, I do not see a real way to increase my income.

I have had my share of gripes about the game, but have logged in each day and played and probably will continue to do so. I am almost hoping for some type of rule change or something just to make it interesting.

Hi, I’m level 5 with about 3.3 Billion, signed in this morning and received 1.1 Billion rent.
I have 9 streets which is a probably a few more than I would like.
Trouble is finding any streets over the 10 million mark, I only own streets between 5 and 8 million.
My biggest issue with the game is the chance cards, this morning only took 10 minutes using bots to do all my building because I got 3 chance card fines, 1) 338M 2)265M 3)58M which is roughly 60% of today’s income. I tried the technique of placing bids on 300 odd million priced streets to tie your money up, but so far I’ve got about 2Billion tied up from players who haven’t yet rejected my offers over the last few days, if this is a regular occurrence I’m going to have the same issue (a lot of money to spend in one go) as I had when I started out…
This wouldn’t be such a pain if the good chance cards were relative to the bad cards, its hardly a boon receiving £500,000 when your balance is in the billions…

I’m continuing to play in the hope that some of the issues are addressed and the game becomes a lot more enjoyable, I think the main driving factor behind my continued play is that I’m too stubborn to give up on a few weeks of daily committed play…

If there does come a time when Hasbro address all the issues after the cut off period and then release a pay per play game I’m sure I would sign up for that, I do get the feeling we are all lab rats for the future project and this is just a b3ta and a chance for some advertising.

Wonderful, I log back in to see if any of my tied up money has been returned, yes, £406Million has been rejected and returned, I build 4 buildings and get a chance fine of £311Million, this frankly is just ridiculous…..

I don’t think that Hasbro has Monopoly City Streets planned for becoming a pay game. I believe it’s totally just a promotion for selling board and computer games this holiday season. And that’s why Tribal is going cheap on support and improvements for this game. They just need it to run good enough to get people thinking about Monopoly. They don’t care if there’s really enough depth or fairness to satisfy serious gamers.

I wonder how a pay game would work? Nobody joining today would have any chance of catching the players who’ve been on since the first day. A fatal flaw in this game is the unrestrained exponential growth which separates players over time, never to be brought back in competition again.

The only way I could see it working would be to launch flights on a regular basis. Say, every month the Monopoly world resets and everybody starts building their empires anew. Maybe tweak the rules each time, so that the players have to develop new strategies rather than just play the same way again.

But that would lose a little of the draw — the ability to be the *only person in the world* who owns a particular road. I was driving to visit my mother last week, and it was exciting to drive on the roads that I own. I kept expecting to see orange construction cones, and I was waiting for 8 o’clock so I could put up more towers!

I cant but agree with your first paragraph, its a shame though, I think this game (with a lot of issues addressed) could take off and make them a tiny fortune.
I remember quite a few years back I paid cold hard cash for a kung fu game (I forget the name now) where it was just a case of pressing a button to activate random moves against your opponent. This is much better.

Unfortunately I have sold all the streets local to me I bought up in the early part of the game as they just werent profitable anymore.

I am in first place on my local leaderboard with a score of $4.5B (although my brother is getting close). I have 10 streets ($4M to $12M base value) and working on filling them with Tobo Places.

I get attacked by another random local player every day or two. I usually hit them twice as hard as they hit me on the first offense. If they keep it up, I hit them with everything I have. Just now I was building Green Houses to retaliate against a $100M kid who started attacking me and I lost $54M when I had only $5M in cash. WTF?!

I don’t use any scripts or extra accounts. My only trick is to float a few trades after collecting rent to reduce the risk of losing my cash to Chance cards. It works pretty well, but sometimes it takes the other players several days to reject the trades. And sometimes several get rejected before I can spend the money, so I get stuck with $600M in cash and lose half to Chance anyway.

My big question now is: What’s my goal? Do I try to stay atop my local leaderboard? Or do I go for something more flashy? Like buy up all the streets in my hometown. Or try to collect famous streets like Brooklyn Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge. Or see how many sub-$1M streets I can buy before I crash the game. Or just sit and collect cash until the day that Mr. Monopoly opens bidding on the reserved streets.

I am level 5, just over 4B, getting about 1B of rent a day now. I have shifted to building Spears End so have not even built up all my streets. I have sold off all my initial streets and now have just 5 long ones. 2 15M’s, a 35M, a 40M and a 50M. I was doing it all manual, but once I passed about 200K a day rent, it just took too long so I started using MCSbot for the heavy lifting.

I think it will be another week or two before I fill up my streets, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. It is only worth getting another street if it is 10M plus which are in sparse supply, so maybe I will be waiting for people to drop off so I can buy up their long streets. I think I will be part of a large crowd for this so it might not be a successful ploy, so maybe I’ll be selling off my SE’s for larger buildings.

I’m rebuilding in increments, replacing grids with blanco’s, then replacing blanco;s with cubic quaters, then replacing them with spear towers, I think that way you are maximising your potential income at a more gradual rate which in turn is giving you more profit day by day.
The re-sale of the buildings you replace is also a factor, you’re getting more back every day with incremental building than selling a few spear towers one by one to facilitate the room required for building sky high towers.

I think you’re doing it right. Upgrading through intermediate buildings is much more profitable than jumping straight from Grid to Sky. I just wrote a Python program to optimize the upgrade path, taking account of purchase price, return price, and rental income for every building.

I found that going straight from Grid to Sky will take 66 days. But going Grid –> (secret recipe) –> Sky will take only 22 days. (Actually, there’s a bug in my calculation somewhere, but that path is definitely cheaper than the direct upgrade.)

I have been playing terribly sub-optimally since filling ten streets with Grid Buildings, but I’m going to try getting back on track tonight.

Affirmative @ Martin. My calculation favors Hips over Difo, but those two are almost identical.

Before I did the calculation, I had started upgrading Grid to Opaque and then jumping Grid to Tobo. It was taking forever! Now I realize that the intermediate steps are important.

There’s one big problem, though. I tried going back to Opaques, but it was going to take 100 buildings just to spend the fraction of cash that I hadn’t hidden in trades. Twenty buildings in, of course, I hit a Chance card that took 95% of my remaining cash.

So I might go back to building something bigger like Tobo just so I can burn through my cash faster and lose less to Chance.

So I have been taking shortcuts and went from Cottage to Grid to Cube to Sky. And after reading the discussions, I am definitely looking at re-thinking my building strategy. The biggest variable is those chance cards. For three days I have been going from Cube to Sky and have lost less than $20 mil in chance cards each day – without have to bother with hiding money in trades. When I was going from Grid to Cube, I was losing $200+ a day and risk even more now that I am bringing in more each payday. So while on paper a graduated approach is most efficient; it becomes a little less clear with the Chance cards.

I dunno, I might stick to my Cube to Sky for a while and see what happens.

I am level 3. I had a good day building stuff and decided to try and cut a local powerhouse’s funding by killing their bonus buildings and putting a factory in there. Boy was that a mistake. Now, twice a day for 3 days, this person has trashed all my streets – destroyed all bonus buildings, building hazards. I’m stuck, I have little income, and can’t in any way communicate to this person an apology for my stupidity.

I’ll do you a favour and buy a street from you if you wanna sell it (I have an ass-load of cash), it’ll give you some extra money. You could send your username to the site owner here and I could give him my e-mail or something? *shrug*

Or what to do to keep getting demo cards (so you can get rid of your hazards) is to sell a building (green house if possible) and then build another one in its place and eventually you’ll get a demo card. Make sure to fill up all of your spaces on the street though so it’s more difficult for him to get you with hazards.

I feel for you Pete – I could definitely help you connect with TJ on the trade if you’d like. keep building yourself back up – they’ll eventually move on to more worthwhile targets, or at least they ought to.

So far he’s left me alone today, so maybe he’s moved on. I just think there should be a way to communicate in the game. The only communication you can make is to do things to other people’s property. Might be nice to say “hey, I’d like to buy this street, how can we make it happen?”

agreed – the lack of communication really cripples the game. it’s the bartering that makes the real life game so great. Hopefully people read sites like this and many others and can communicate through that for the time being, but their next iteration of the game desperately needs this piece.

Got to level 6 today, 3bil rent after taxes. Still suffering from the max number of buildings per street, got 1065, 919, 417, 415, 415, 415, 411, 411, 410, 209 buildings respectively – first two were done before the problem, last one was bought today and I ran out of money See a patter in the 410s? Can’t wait for them to fix it…

They’re all grid buildings. I bought the street ages ago, during fillup the max building cap happened. It originally had about 3400 spots for a grid building, over 1400 are still available. About half the spots are usable, so that leaves room for 700 more grid buildings
If I had built green houses instead there’d be over 7500 spots available, so maybe 3500-4000 buildings possible… if only they fixed the building cap. Can’t even sell buildings there and build more expensive ones, because I’d have to sell over 600 before I can build the first new one. Wasted a couple buildings to find that out :p

Do you have any income? I’ve been wondering what happens when you pass 38 streets. Does your tax really hit 100%, or is there a bug (or undocumented feature)? Will it subtract from your cash holdings to get more than 100% tax from you? Will it repossess your streets? Will your score go negative?

I don’t have any reason to not believe that it will cause zero income. Nor do I really want to test it by going out that far. The tax can be quite painful enough already… and yes, i’m sure he just wants a link clicked…

When a street is offered as part of a trade it can be stolen, and there are some more bug conditions where this can happen. I could now post a link to some streets that are owned, but when you click the wad of cash to list available streets they show up as pink, thus as buyable. That’d expose them to stealing though, so I’d rather not post those.

OMG. This just happened to me. BILLY HILL bid on one of my streets and I rejected the bid. Then later I tried building on my own streets, to find that one of them (State Highway 6) is listed as owned by him (despite still being in the list of my properties).

I checked the logs and somehow he bought the street and constructed new buildings afresh. I can’t even place hazards on the street since it’s still in my properties, but I can’t build normal buildings on it either.

I’m having a hard time thinking of anything that would make me angrier in a game then having my possessions blatantly stolen.